What is a Healthy Diet?

Have you ever stopped to really think about this question? I often hear people talking about specific foods being healthy or unhealthy, but how do we define which foods are “good” for us and which aren’t, and how do we know if a specific diet is healthy or not? While some people might say that a healthy diet is a diet that provides an “adequate” supply of the essential nutrients, I don’t feel that this definition is very good. First of all, it’s difficult to define what an adequate amount really is, and even if we manage to determine how much we “need” of certain food components, those values don’t necessarily reflect the optimal intake. Second, nutrition is about so much more than just getting the necessary nutrients we need to survive!

I feel it’s time to look beyond the tired old discussion of fats and carbohydrates and vitamins and really establish the foundation of what human nutrition is all about. This goes back to the approach I outlined in my post on the pyramid concept, a way of thinking that is based on the idea that all good hypotheses and conclusions have to be rooted in a robust underlying structure. Just like jumping in with specific hypotheses of obesity is premature if we don’t have a solid foundation to build our ideas upon, we can’t really understand human nutrition without having first established the basics. In this post I’m not going to outline the specific components of a healthy diet, as this is something I’ve written a lot about in the past. Instead I’m going to try to establish the fundamental facts. Diet is among the most controversial topics out there, and everyone seems to have an opinion about what a healthy diet looks like; but at the most basic level, what is really a healthy diet?

General characteristics of a healthy diet

So, I guess you’re asking yourself, how does such a diet look like? Although humans are able to adapt to a wide range of dietary patterns, that clearly doesn’t mean that all diets are the same. I’ve previously written extensively about the components of a healthy diet so I’m not going to delve into the specifics here. However, here are some general characteristics:

• Eat predominantly “real”, whole food.
• Meat, seafood, eggs, vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts, dairy (preferably raw, fermented, and full-fat), and legumes should make up the basis of your diet. Don’t eat a lot of grains (e.g., poor micronutrient profile, low levels of high quality protein, high carbohydrate content, and many antinutritional compounds) unless you have the time to traditionally prepare them (e.g., fermentation).
• Protein >15%, carbohydrate <40%. You can certainly be healthy on a diet that contains less protein and/or more carbohydrate than this, but it’s rarely optimal. Even the most hard training endurance athlete need much more than 40% carbohydrate in their diet. Also, from a practical standpoint, if you’re getting most of your carbohydrate from fruits, tubers, legumes, vegetables, and nuts (which you probably should), as opposed to grains, it’s pretty hard to get above 35-40% carbohydrate unless you’re stuffing yourself with tubers and potatoes all day long.
• Eat some type of traditionally fermented food.
• Choose locally produced, grass-fed, and/or organic when possible.
• Make sure you’re getting plenty of fermentable substrates (e.g., onions, leeks, green bananas, potato starch) in your diet.
• Regularly eat fatty fish, organ meats, or other foods high in omega-3 and/or vitamin D.
• Drink high quality water.

source : http://organicfitness.com/what-is-a-healthy-diet/